


cosmic love

by witching



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Banter, Communication, Established Relationship, Fluff, Happy Ending, Heart-to-Heart, Kissing, Light Angst, M/M, Season/Series 05, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25695964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witching/pseuds/witching
Summary: "Oh, yeah, I'm absolutely your boyfriend," Martin promised with a fervent nod of his head. "I was just thinking.""Thinking what?" Jon asked, slow and unsure."Thinking—we could be married," Martin explained with half a shrug, trying to act nonchalant to cover for the fact that his face was rapidly heating up, his heart pounding in his chest.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 29
Kudos: 282





	cosmic love

**Author's Note:**

> i was sad so i decided it was absolutely imperative to give jon and martin a little post-apocalyptic post-it wedding bc they deserve it. they get to be happy bc i said so. also im stating explicitly that this fic exists in a canon divergence au where everything is exactly the same except they do save the world and get a happy ending, so theres no need to be sad abt the futility of all of this, dw bc within the bubble of this little fic they will truly be alright.  
> this takes place at a nebulous point in time after the gardener. i wasnt thinking too hard abt timelines or any other implications of the universe i was only thinking abt jon saying martin was his boyfriend

_i took the stars from our eyes, and then i made a map_  
_and knew that somehow i could find my way back_  
_then i heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too_  
_so i stayed in the darkness with you_

// florence + the machine, _'cosmic love'_

* * *

The apocalypse was, all told, rather quieter than Martin would have expected. There was more empty space between events than there was commotion, and they could rest whenever they wanted, and they were talking with each other more than they ever had before. They were being honest and really getting to know each other in the way that new couples do. It was just bittersweet because of, well, everything.

It was one of their moments of quiet, and they were standing against a freakishly large tree stump, pressed together leaning on each other from shoulder to hip, when Jon suddenly took a short, ragged breath and turned to look up at him. Martin met his eyes with a quizzical expression, a furrowed brow, and waited patiently for Jon to speak his mind.

At length, he blinked his round, sad eyes and mumbled, "I'm sorry, Martin. I'm so sorry."

Martin frowned at him in consternation and concern before smoothing out his face and assuring him, all earnest and gentle, "You've nothing to be sorry for, Jon."

Jon rolled his eyes, even as they began to brim with tears. "We both know that's not true," he scoffed.

"Alright, fine," Martin conceded, "I could probably think up a short list of things that I would appreciate apologies for. This,"—he gestured around them at the massive landscape, empty and dead and cold—"is not one of them."

"Don't—you don't have to pretend, you know." Jon's voice was small and sad, tinged with bitter resignation, and he refused to meet Martin's eyes as he spoke.

Hands settling on his hips, Martin cocked his head to the side and put quite a bit of effort into doctoring his tone so as to sound curious but not mockingly naive, firm but not upset. "Pretend what, Jon?"

Jon swallowed hard, took a deep breath. "Pretend you don't hate me for it," he answered in a wavering, watery voice. "Pretend you don't regret what brought us here. Which is me."

"Jon. Look at me." Martin waited in silence until Jon could bear to tear his eyes from the ground and look up at his face. "You did not do this," he said, soft and fierce and full of an intense, fervent heat. "This is not you. It is not your fault."

"You keep saying it, but how can that be true?" Jon snapped, then lowered his voice, looked down at his feet again, and mumbled shamefully, "None of this would have happened if it weren't for me."

"There are so many things that so many people could have done differently to prevent this," Martin insisted, reaching out to take both of Jon's hands in his own. "What if I'd stayed behind to listen to you record that statement? What if... Peter hadn't resisted your questions? What if I'd killed Elias when Peter asked me to? What if Daisy had killed you, what if Oliver hadn't come to your bedside, what if Tim hadn't been such a martyr? What if the cab driver who nearly ran over Elias when he was seventeen hadn't seen him in time?"

"It was a bus when he was twenty, actually," Jon interjected, then immediately winced at the unwanted knowledge and the fact that he had thoughtlessly, tactlessly regurgitated it. "Sorry."

"You know what I mean." Martin rubbed his thumbs in soothing little circles on the backs of Jon's hands, offering up a small smile as added reassurance. "There's too much, Jon, you can't hold all of it on your own shoulders."

Jon blew out a long, low breath between his teeth, shaking his head in frustration and disbelief. "So, what, I'm meant to let innocent people bear the weight of my mistakes? Let them break their backs for me?"

Martin was quiet for a long, heavy moment, then he murmured in a voice like a warm blanket, _"You're_ an innocent person, Jon."

Jon stared at the ground again, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, and shook his head. He knew that it was a futile argument, they had done it so many times already, and he knew there was no convincing Martin, but he didn't really know what else to do. Eventually, he took a deep breath, lifted his head to give Martin a long, aching look, his eyes wide and wet. 

"You deserve better," he said at length. "I wanted—," he cut himself off with a strangled sound, a sob caught in his throat. "I wanted to give you everything."

Martin inhaled sharply through his nose, let the breath out in a long, shaky sigh. "Jon..." he whispered, voice full of helpless pain. 

"I wanted to marry you," Jon continued, emboldened but no less bitter. "We could have had—a whole life, Martin, we could have had... maybe not kids, but we could have had many debates on the pros and cons of having kids. We could have been happy."

"Jon," Martin repeated, firmly this time, squeezing Jon's hands to calm him. "I promise you that we will scrape together what is salvageable about this, no matter what happens. Apocalypse or no, I'm happier with you than I ever was without. And—push comes to shove? If all else is a bust, maybe it's a consolation prize, but I personally will rip out Elias's throat for doing this to you, for making you believe that you are anything less than a wonder."

Attempting to stifle a smile, Jon pressed his lips together in a tight line. "Thank you, Martin."

Martin huffed out a laugh, but responded with a breezy, "You're welcome." He was quiet for a beat, then added in a bright voice: "Jon... you said I was your _boyfriend,_ the other—before."

Jon furrowed his brow deeply, his eyes flashing first confusion, then surprise, a hint of hurt, and finally settling on anxiety. He pulled his hands from Martin's to fold his arms across his chest, a kind of armor, a preemptive defense against what he thought was an inevitable rejection. "Yes. I mean... aren't you?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm absolutely your boyfriend," Martin promised with a fervent nod of his head. "I was just thinking."

"Thinking what?" Jon asked, slow and unsure.

"Thinking—we could be married," Martin explained with half a shrug, trying to act nonchalant to cover for the fact that his face was rapidly heating up, his heart pounding in his chest.

That caught Jon off guard, enough that he couldn't reply for a long moment. "What do you mean? Maybe if we somehow manage to turn the world back, but..."

"No," Martin said, shaking his head decisively. "We can be married, here and now. What's to stop us? Not like there are—governments, or bloody priests, or what have you."

"Well, there probably are... _bloody_ priests, somewhere around here."

"Not what I meant, Jon," said Martin, sighing in equal parts fondness and exasperation. "We wouldn't need a priest, anyway. Which domain has the rabbis?"

"The Hunt—no, I know what you meant," Jon replied, closing his eyes and shaking his head at his inability to keep his mouth shut. He should have known that a joke wouldn't go over well, given his history with making jokes, and he definitely should have thought before answering Martin's clearly rhetorical question, supplying him with information he probably didn't want or need. Jon shook his head again, forcing himself to return to the issue at hand, at which point the actual implications of the conversation finally hit him, and he looked up at Martin, brows raised and voice high. "You—you really think? I mean... you want that?"

Martin rolled his eyes so heavily, so loudly that Jon could have sworn they were liable to fall out of his head. "God, you can be so stupid..." he muttered under his breath. "Do I _want_ it, Jon? Honestly."

Shuffling his feet, Jon ventured sheepishly, "So that's a yes?"

The soft breath of a laugh that escaped Martin was only slightly undermined by the accompanying smack he delivered to Jon's arm. "Ask me properly, you pillock."

"Gladly." Jon sunk to one knee in a smooth motion, looking up at Martin with wide eyes and a bright, sincere grin. "Martin Blackwood... you're the best thing that's ever happened to me. Best thing that's ever happened, period. I love you with every single atom of my rotten body and soul, and I want to spend the rest of my life—the rest of eternity with you. Will you do me the immense honor of being my husband?"

"Yes, Jon, of course," Martin exclaimed, practically cutting Jon off in his rush to get the words out before he started crying in earnest. "You can officiate the wedding with your scary Beholding powers."

"Sounds rather... grandiose, for just the two of us," said Jon, narrowing his eyes skeptically.

"You're the most important person in the universe," Martin reminded him with a wide smile. He extended a hand to help Jon to stand, pulled him up to his feet as he spoke. "We deserve to splurge on the cosmic forces that bind us together."

 _"Most important..."_ Jon muttered under his breath. "I would be nothing without you."

"And I'd be dead without you," Martin countered, "so I think we're even."

Jon couldn't quite argue with that, much as he would have liked to, so he simply nodded his head and gnawed on the inside of his cheek. "Sure, if you say so," he said with a small laugh, then perked up, straightened his back with a realization as if a lightbulb popped up over his head. "Do you want to—I don't know, say something? Vows, right? People do vows?"

Martin frowned suddenly, pursing his lips, and hesitated for a long moment. "We don't really need vows, do we?" he asked, his voice high and bordering on nervous. "I think we're on the same page regarding our undying dedication to each other and all that. Just declare us wedded so I can kiss the groom."

"You can kiss me whenever you want, Martin," Jon told him with a wry smile. "It's not every day you get to recite vows."

Thinking about it, Martin agreed easily, because he had been waiting a long time for this, and despite his reluctance to wait even a second for it, he couldn't deny there was a large part of him that longed to hear what Jon had to say. He recalled nights he'd kept himself up late, curled up in bed and imagining what their wedding would look like—it had been a distant fantasy back then, and now it was real, even if it wasn't quite the way he'd thought it would be. He simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to make his vows and receive Jon's in return.

"Okay, yeah. Let's do it," he said breathlessly, his cheeks already hurting from the broad smile that wouldn't leave his face.

The answering smile that sprang to Jon's face was nearly blinding before he looked away again, sheepish as his cheeks flushed dark and hot. "Right. So, what—what should we promise? I'll give you—anything you want, really."

After taking another moment to come to terms with the reality of the situation, taking a deep breath, wringing his hands to give him an excuse to surreptitiously pinch himself, Martin found an answer. "Trust," he stated plainly. "We have to trust each other, above all else."

"Of course," Jon breathed, nodding his head. "And... do our best to always be deserving of that trust."

"Yeah. Honesty, and—openness," Martin said. "Promise to talk to each other about things."

Jon paused, his eyes twinkling with a hint of amusement underneath the sheer joy and love emanating from his every pore. He reached out and took Martin's hand, twining their fingers together and proceeding with a coy tilt to his smile. "Promise you'll tell me when I'm being a prick?" he asked, his voice low and sweet.

Laughing softly, Martin nodded in agreement. "And you'll tell me when I'm being a bitch."

After taking a moment to sober slightly, Jon looked deep into Martin's eyes, his gaze all intensity and feverish sincerity. He was possibly more determined than Martin had ever seen him before when he added in a soft, fervent tone, "Promise that we'll stick together, no matter what."

His eyes beginning to get misty, Martin nodded again, longer and slower. "Yeah," he murmured, his voice thick and breaking in the middle. He swallowed and cleared his throat, blinking his tears back, and pressed on: "Yeah, sounds good to me, definitely. Is that all? Because I don't want to rush this, but I would like to kiss my husband."

"Alright, fine," Jon answered, his long-suffering tone belying the eagerness bubbling up within his own chest. "By the powers vested in me by the state of—the universe, I guess?—I now declare us married. You may kiss the groom."

Martin was on him in a second, taking Jon's face in both his hands and kissing him hard enough to bruise his lips. He licked into Jon's mouth with abandon, impatient and heated, nipping at Jon's lips and sliding his tongue along the line of Jon's teeth. Jon responded in kind, throwing his arms around Martin's neck, pulling himself up onto his toes to press as close to Martin as he possibly could, to lean into the kiss with everything in him.

There was a small upside, all things considered, to the circumstances in which they were doing this—namely, that if they had been able to do a traditional wedding, with loved ones gathered around, then this kiss would have been highly inappropriate. As things stood, they didn't have to worry about passionate public displays of affection, because there was nobody there to see them, nobody to clear their throat pointedly when they got entirely lost in each other, nobody but the two of them.

When Martin finally detached from Jon's mouth to catch his breath, he dropped his hands from Jon's face to settle on his waist, and Jon refused to release his hold on Martin. They stayed close, their heavy, panting breaths dancing hot across each other's skin, and Jon let his head fall to rest his forehead against Martin's cheek, overwhelmed by the exertion and the emotion both. He turned slightly to press a soft kiss to Martin's jaw, his lips quirking up into a smile against Martin's skin.

"Does it feel any different?" he asked, little more than a whisper.

"Kissing you? Yeah," Martin replied dreamily. "It feels... I don't know. Every single kiss has been significant and special, and I always—I mean, it's not as if I was _ever_ going to leave you in the first place, but—I guess the permanence makes it feel more, more potent?"

"You like to feel stable," Jon said, not a question. "It's comforting for you, to have something like that—something official, a title or a vow or something."

Martin nodded his head minutely with a small, thoughtful hum. "Yeah."

"Yeah," Jon echoed back at him, sounding equally vague and pensive. "I get it. I like it, too. Putting a name to it, talking about it, so we—so we know we're on the same page. No misunderstandings, no assumptions. I think that's good for both of us."

"I love you," was Martin's simple reply, then he took a breath, exhaled it shakily. "I love you so much, Jon, this is all still just—it's unreal, it's unbelievable. I just, I can't believe that you're—that you—God, I can't even say it."

"That I love you, too?" Jon suggested, lifting his head to raise an eyebrow at Martin. "That I love you so dearly, so deeply that the whole world means nothing to me if you're not here? That I would crawl on my hands and knees to the edge of the universe if you only asked it of me?"

Martin froze, swallowed hard around an emotional lump in his throat. "Hm," he squeaked breathlessly. "Yeah, that."

Jon smiled warmly and lifted himself up on his toes to kiss him again, slow and sweet and deep. He hummed pleasantly against Martin's lips, savoring the taste of him and the feel of his skin and the smell of coconut that always seemed to linger around him. Jon thought it came from Martin's hair, but he couldn't be sure of the source, and it was a mystery in any case, because it wasn't as if there were many beauty products in the apocalypse, and they had quickly found out that things like personal grooming were quite unnecessary.

Those thoughts were vague and distant, easily overridden by the sensations in the moment; even Jon's highly distractable mind couldn't be distracted for very long when Martin's tongue was soft and slick and slipping between his lips. He breathed a contented sigh, leaning heavily into Martin's body, and Martin responded by wrapping his arms around Jon's middle, settling his hands on his back, broad and flat and warm, pressing into his skin through the thin fabric of his shirt and pulling him close until he could feel Martin's heartbeat hammering against his chest.

At the feel of Martin's teeth grazing his lower lip, Jon gasped softly and broke the kiss, rocking back on his heels and taking a moment to regain his balance and his breath. Martin looked down at him with heavy-lidded eyes, lips parted and kiss-slick and swollen, cheeks flushed hot. His arms still encircled Jon securely, and Jon tightened his own hold around Martin's neck, and they stood still for a minute or two before Martin eventually broke the silence.

"Wish I could stay like this," he murmured softly, wistfully. "Just stay here and hold you forever, never have to—to let you go or worry about you or anything."

"We could do that," answered Jon with a quiet breath of a laugh, "but I think I would much rather save the world with you, and then we can live happily ever after."

"Right. The world," said Martin, sounding rueful. "Forgot about that. We should... probably do that first, yeah. Can I add an amendment to our vows?"

Jon furrowed his brow, more confused than concerned. "Of course, love. What is it?"

It took a moment for Martin to get the words out, but he managed eventually. "Promise me that you won't die," he said, closing his eyes against the reflexive embarrassment of asking for what he needed and the added shame of asking something so silly and futile of Jon. "I mean, you can't be sure, obviously, but promise you'll try, _really_ try. You're more important than the world."

"I'm not," Jon protested.

"You are to me," Martin insisted fiercely.

"Fine," said Jon, his face softening, "I promise."

"Thank you." Martin kissed the center of Jon's forehead before disentangling their limbs and taking a small step back, waving a hand in a sort of _after you_ gesture. "Now we can keep going, if you want."

Taking Martin's hand and entwining their fingers once more, Jon began to lead the way, walking in a seemingly random direction. "You know," he said in an offhand, conversational tone, "I'm going to tell every single avatar that you're my husband before I smite them."

Martin smiled, _beamed_ at him in a way that put the sun to shame. "You'd better," he laughed, and walked along with Jon, feeling like he was floating. Jon's hand was soft in his, and his steps were lighter than the air, and the grandest powers in the universe were nothing at all compared to the love glowing warm inside his chest.


End file.
